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The MP3 format changed the music industry


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The MP3 format changed the music industry

The MP3 format revolutionized the world of music. For better or for worse, this audio coding format made listening to (and sharing) music through the Internet popularized in such a way that the entire industry ended up adopting this or other solutions to end up making the leap to a model in which the physical format yielded prominence to downloads and streaming.

The technology, however, was subject to patents that were defended by Technicolor, but these patents – still in force for encoders, for example – fully expired on April 16, 2017. MP3 is now more free than ever.

Never before, MP3 patents

Those responsible for Fraunhofer IIS explained a few days ago how “on April 23, 2017, the Technicolor mp3 licensing program for certain patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS related to the mp3 has expired.”

Fraun

In that message, thanks to all those who have licensed the technology for their support of a format that became the “defacto audio codec worldwide for the last two decades”, and highlighted that even though there are more efficient audio codecs, mp3 is still “very popular with consumers”. MP3’s success paralleled that of the legendary Winamp, the player that became that symbol of a change of scene in the audio industry.

Those patents have been very beneficial for their owners: it is estimated that thanks to them the Fraunhofer Society achieved an income that reached 100 million euros in 2005. Those amounts of money caused many others to try to take a piece of that juicy cake, and lawsuits and lawsuits regarding who owned what in the MP3 segment have been frequent.

Alternatives exist, but MP3 doesn’t seem to lose strength

The MP3 format (MPEG-1 Layer 3) has arguably been the most popular “lossy” audio format — we lose data in encoding — but it certainly isn’t technically the best. The rise of the format and its deficiencies made in fact that many others tried to develop alternatives with which to conquer the market.

Mp31
Among those codecs is the AAC family of formats, which does not require the payment of licenses to stream or distribute content in that format. Of course, there are patents for the development of AAC codecs, which forces those who implement Open Source software that takes advantage of this format to distribute it only with the code, as in the case of the famous FFMpeg.

This format has become enormously popular, and is used by Apple’s devices and services, but it is also widely used by Google both on its Android platform and on YouTube. Many other products include native support for the reproduction of these contents nowadays, both for being royalty-free and for the improvements in the coding that allow that at similar bitrates the quality of AAC audio tends to be superior to that of MP3s.

Another of the great protagonists is Vorbis, the audio codec that is part of the well-known Ogg Vorbis container and that offers even more advantages in terms of patents or royalties: all its specifications are in the public domain, the libraries are published through a license BSD, while the tools to encode and decode files in this format are licensed under the LGPL.

This format is not as widespread as AAC, but it is still very relevant today and in fact it is used massively on Spotify, the most popular streaming service worldwide today.

These two examples are combined with the presence of a good number of alternatives, both with and without loss, which have been gaining some ground in recent years. None of them, however, has ceased to diminish the relevance of the MP3 format, which remains one of the key options for end users when it comes to enjoying music in digital format.

And if it was previously feasible to do so, the end of patents in full should even further support the use of this codec that, as we said, changed the music industry forever.


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All about the mp3

Beyond a simple audio compression format, MP3 is the most widespread sound standard: there is currently no device that boasts of being “multimedia” that does not support the reproduction of these files.

Although for some it seems somewhat modern, the MP3 format has a lot of development time. It all started in the early 1990s, thanks to a group of European programmers who wanted to perform an effective audio compression algorithm, which would save storage space while maintaining a similar quality. Beyond the use that we can give to place more songs on the same CD or DVD, this saving in space is very important for digital communications. Indeed, one of the first uses that MP3 and their predecessors had was in radio networks and modem music transmissions.

So, basically, we can say that MP3 is a compression format of music files (and audio in general) that occupies neither more nor less than one tenth of what the same song weighs on a conventional audio CD. And the best part is that the sound quality is practically the same.

How does it work?

 

Those who developed the MP3 were based on psychoacoustics, which is a science that aims to analyze how human beings perceive sounds. On the basis of an intensive study of this concept, everything “unhelpful” can be eliminated and space saved without a common human being finding any difference from the original information. One of the main secrets of MP3 is that in its data it eliminates all frequencies not audible by the human (that is, more serious or more acute than what we can hear), so the only ones that are able to perceive any difference are our pets.

Another interesting feature of MP3 is variable bitrate. The bitrate is the amount of information bits that are transmitted in a second of audio: if it is larger, the sound will have a better resolution and will be more faithful to the original. For example, the standard for MP3 is 128 kbps (1 MB per minute), although there are many who use one of 192 or 256 kbps to improve fidelity. Placing a variable bitrate allows us to prioritize quality in those parts of “dynamic sound” and save in those that do not need more quality. However, since this variable bitrate technique depends a lot on the program with which the information is compressed, and is not always completely faithful, it is usually customary to use a fixed one.

 

Play MP3 on PC

 

There is an infinity of software to play music in MP3 format on our computer. Several of them are excellent, but there are certainly two that are much more popular than the rest. Why? One, for being one of the first and most classic, and the other, for being included in Windows and offering good benefits to the user: Winamp and Windows Media Player.

Initially, Winamp (www.winamp.com) was characterized as a very small and beautiful program, one of the first to use skins to change its appearance. Today, he only has the beauty, since his predefined window is much larger and more complete. However, it maintains a modular design that allows us to close each section as it suits us, to make the program more compact.

For several years, Microsoft has the desire to own the most used multimedia player in the world, and possibly has achieved it thanks to its integration into its system

Windows operating from the XP version. Beyond the differences that may be in the interface, with Windows Media Player we can do almost the same as with Winamp.

Which is better? That depends on each user in particular, although there are more followers of Winamp, especially because of the large number of interesting additions it has to improve the sound and listen to online radios through ShoutCast.

 

CD to MP3

 

Now that we know how to play MP3 music, the following question arises: how do we get MP3 files? There are many ways, such as downloading music directly from the internet (provided this distribution method is legal), or generate MP3 recording something with the microphone of our PC. But the most used is still the transfer of an audio CD to music in MP3 format. While there are several programs